Authors — Whitney Mallett
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Counter-Brogramming: The 39th Atlanta Film Festival
Atlanta Film Festival falls right on the heels of SXSW, and its penchant for women directors and strong female leads is refreshing after Austin, where lesser Indiewood bro-coms go to die and where this year even some of my favorite films veered into man-child territory. Kristy Breneman and Christina Humphrey, the two young programmers behind Atlanta’s welcome change of pace, have inherited the 39-year-old festival and are crafting an earnestly community-minded identity in the midst of a rapidly changing city. Its growth is in part due to the fact that tax incentives have enticed more productions from Hollywood to Atlanta […]
by Whitney Mallett on Apr 13, 2015 -
The Tyranny of Interconnection: Two SXSW Films Tackle the Social Technology Present/Future
In a half empty hotel ballroom in Austin last week, Brian Schuster — a porn entrepreneur giving a lecture on the future of the adult industry — introduced the concept of “the social singularity,” the idea that the difference between our networked relationships and our IRL ones will eventually become indistinguishable. With texts, tweets, Skype, and FaceTime, we’re already getting pretty close to that futuristic premise, something a lot of films still struggle to incorporate into their storytelling. But two of the best films this year at SXSW, Ben Dickinson’s Creative Control and Eugene Kotlyarenko’s A Wonderful Cloud, updated familiar […]
by Whitney Mallett on Mar 26, 2015 -
Redrawing the Boundaries
MDFF is a Toronto-based production company steadily churning out nuanced humanist films that capture a particular middle-class Canadian experience, while at the same time challenging the tendency for Canadian cinema to stay ghettoized within its own borders. Its founders, Kazik Radwankski and Dan Montgomery, are doing more than just bringing regional idiosyncrasies such as Toronto’s racoons or Vancouver’s methadone clinics to European film festivals. They’re using MDFF as an umbrella to foster a film-going culture in their own city, simultaneously supporting the emerging independent filmmakers north and south of the border whose films they produce and screen. Radwanski and Montgomery […]
by Whitney Mallett on Oct 20, 2014 -
Screening Abel Ferrara’s Director’s Cut of Cat Chaser
After Cat Chaser, Abel Ferrera was reluctant to give up final cut again, not without a fight anyways. The erotic thriller’s 1989 theatrical release, complete with a clunky voiceover ghosted by another actor because leading hunk Peter Weller refused, has a fundamentally different character from Ferrera’s director’s cut currently housed in the basement at Anthology Film Archives. Last Tuesday, Anthology screened the only known copy, on video with time code, a rough audio mix, and without a score, for the first time maybe ever since it played on the Fox lot to studio bigwigs in the ’80s. That’s the last […]
by Whitney Mallett on Jul 28, 2014
